On September 11, when fuel-laden airliners exploded into 20th-century
icons, when massive buildings disintegrated and the world seemed suddenly
to change, the first casualty identified on television was our graduate,
the author, CNN commentator and so much more, Barbara Olson. Barbara was
to be specially remembered, nationally and internationally, because of
her last communication before the violent descent into the Pentagon, a
cell-phone call to her husband, Ted, as he sat in his Justice Department
office. But her iconic role was more significant: she had, in the years
before her death, been personally effective in changing public opinion,
in battling for hearts and minds through a highly effective use of the US
media. Without much assistance, she had created an entity, the Independent
Women’s Forum, and developed a brilliant persona as its effective spokesperson
for a conservative ideology. And, finally, she developed a platform for
herself using the many apertures for persuasion afforded by the new technologies
that had transformed the global communications landscape.
She was an exemplar of intense participation in a marketplace of ideas
in which individuals and groups could deploy electronic soap boxes and turn
them into powerful megaphones. She showed by example how to manage imagery
and ideas within national borders and beyond. Olson had propounded her views
to support a political movement within the United States, to affect voter
behavior, to help, dramatically, in the impact on elections and to convince
many to adopt her perspectives as a mainstream movement. Ironically, the notion of powerful, effective, shaping uses of the
media, just where Barbara excelled, moved to the foreground with the events
of September 11. Until then there was precious little public attention to
its place in the armament of external influence. Scholarly treatment of
international broadcasting had lagged and, as a subject, it had not been central
to international relations academic work.* All of a sudden, “hearts and minds,”
the mental and emotional kilns in which hatreds are stoked, emerged as a
meaningful and urgent battleground for large-scale state concern. After the
attack on the World Trade Center, the significance of a “clash of civilizations”
was no longer only a question for debate in academic institutions. It became
clear that military responses were insufficient to counter reservoirs of inculcation
and belief that nourished future terrorists or aggressors against the West.
In an explicit, broadly demanded strategy, there existed concern about the
entire context in which such attitudes were formed.

An international communications
landscape that had been seen
previously
as capable of developing pluralism, diversity, and democracy
was now seen to harbor the weeds and thorns of conflict, danger, and
instability.

Now, political figures were paying closer attention to the mix and content
of voices in other countries, concentrating on the power of media, to be
sure, but also to such previously off-limits areas as the nature of religious
education, the policy of leadership in tolerating or quietly reinforcing
harshly anti-Western speech. The discovery that individuals were being shaped
over years in ways unseen and unanticipated, and that as a result they could
become instruments of violent destruction, forced a response. The United States
and others are re-examining the role of public diplomacy—including international
broadcasting—as a tool in a long process of counter-education, counter-programming.
An international communications landscape that had been seen previously
as capable of developing pluralism, diversity, and democracy was now seen
to harbor the weeds and thorns of conflict, danger, and instability. At
the end of the old century, there was, in the post-Soviet period, a celebration
of the breaking out, seemingly everywhere, of the right to receive and impart
information. The dream was, and still is, for a world where information
moves without various forms of restriction, for transparent government and
educated citizenry. To achieve such a world, the power of states to control
the images that permeate their terrain is in question everywhere.
All this remains true in the post-September 11 era. But there is something
added: preoccupation with national and global security means a frenzied
testing of new and modified techniques aimed at regulating, if not mastering,
the global market for speech. September 11 was an extraordinary wake-up call
about the movement of ideas in the world, and the way in which some ideas—ideas
deeply and treacherously held—can have enormous consequences for global
stability, peace of mind, and the conduct of ordinary life.
In the war against terrorism (and in many previous wars) public opinion
is a significant front for engagement. New examples of the vital importance
of information policy to war emerge daily, often amplifying a sense of frustration
about negative global attitudes toward the United States.
In a moment of exasperation, Congressman Henry Hyde summarized the feeling
of many: “How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison
Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas?” In
February 2002, The New York Times reported the establishment of an
Office of Strategic Influence in the Pentagon, designed to deploy information
as a coordinated weapon of US national defense. But under the pressure of
public opinion, the idea of the office was abandoned.

The United States and others are re-examining the role
of public diplomacy—including international broadcasting—as
a tool
in a long process
of counter-education, counter-programming.

The Office of Strategic Influence should be seen in context. With the
end of the Cold War, long-standing United States government efforts to
help shape global public opinion on matters significant to national security
were essentially privatized. The morale of the United States Information
Agency (USIA), the prime instrument for this function and descendant of the
World War II Office of War Information, declined. USIA was finally disembodied
and merged into the State Department. In fact, in contrast to the USIA,
Hollywood and Madison Avenue, CNN, and the Motion Picture Association of
America were celebrated as extremely effective carriers and projectors of
American values. Gaining so fabulous a global reach, so pervasive a presence,
America had fostered mass overseas markets and created exuberantly receptive
audiences. Who needed the Voice of America and other elements of a tired
and somewhat bloated information apparatus?
I have spent much of the last few years exploring these questions with
students at Cardozo and at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy
at the University of Oxford. I have tried to analyze and describe why one
society has an interest in the media space of another and how it goes about
trying to affect it. In the process, a world emerges in which decisions
about speech and culture are made multilaterally, among or between governments
and with great transnational corporations. These arrangements reflect a
marketplace of ideas, which I often call a marketplace for loyalties. This
is the market in which Barbara Olson was so effective.

Information Intervention As can be seen in Afghanistan, a media-related foreign policy becomes
more tangible and more immediately necessary in moments of conflict. At
such a time, the geopolitical stakes in the patterns of distribution of information
are too high to be left solely to some fictive market in which governments
do not actively participate. Information intervention—an affirmative effort
to engage media realities—has a long tradition in its relationship to the
run-up, avoidance, or resolving of war.
In the 1990s, proposals began to be made for concerted action by the
international community to forestall use of broadcast media that promoted
or accentuated devastating, often genocidal, conflict. It became common
to point to the explosive mobilizing role Radio-Television Libre des Milles
Collines (RTLM) played in Rwanda, with its repetitious and explicit incitement
for Hutu to slaughter Tutsi. That became the textbook example where preventive
intervention by the international community should have been deemed suitable
and necessary.
Before the genocide, NGOs sought, unsuccessfully, United States
assistance in jamming violent broadcasts. What emerged, fitfully, after
Rwanda, was a growing interest in information intervention as a way to broaden
the range of intermediary opportunities available to the UN, NATO, or the
United States as it engaged in peacekeeping measures in ethnic and other
conflicts. Elements of information intervention would—at the outside—include
the kind of jamming sought in Rwanda. There were also more traditional approaches
such as monitoring local transmissions and so-called peace broadcasting
(a channel of information that was “objective” and had as its goal defusing
conflict). In extreme cases offending broadcasts were jammed.

International Public Information Group In April 1999, there was a concrete precedent for the later Office
of Strategic Influence. The White House issued Presidential Decision Directive
68, which sought to develop and consolidate approaches to international
information space. The International Public Information Group (IPIG) had
members from the State Department, United States Agency for International
Development, the National Intelligence Council, the National Security Council,
the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The composition
of this group, particularly the inclusion of members of the intelligence
and military community, was designed to reflect the importance of media to
foreign policy and national security.

In the wake of September 11, there is an urgency
to addressing the attitudes, perceptions, longings,
and fears of a world concerned about its future.

After the 1999 NATO military intervention in Kosovo and with the prodding
of IPIG, the United States took the lead in establishing a “Ring around
Serbia.” This ad hoc and creatively assembled group of peripheral transmitters
broadcast non-Milosevic voices into parts of the former Yugoslavia. This
aspect of “information intervention” provided an effective mode of distribution,
too, for reinforced Serbo-Croatian programming of the Voice of America, the
BBC, the United States surrogate, RFE/RL, and Deutsche Welle. The US government
persuaded the leadership in Republika Srpska to allow transmitters there
to be retooled for the Serbian information action. The Ring around Serbia
also included transmissions from Romania and Croatia.

Elements of an Information Foreign Policy The shapelessness of transnational information networks, especially
as the Internet significantly affects information flow, compels a new set
of responses. If a government uses persuasion through information as part
of its foreign policy, then it must find new mechanisms and employ new skills.
Any government engaged in these processes must be far more conscious and
pro-active about the modes of information distribution. It must also allow
public debate to ensure the development and use of best practices.
Implementation of a foreign policy of information that focuses on media
structures must include the following: better understanding of the role
of international broadcasting, the Voice of America, and its counterpart;
sustained assistance for favored forms of media abroad; sponsoring the export
of legal and policy models regarding media structures (and rewarding those
states that adopt the favored model); expanding or altering state-sponsored
international broadcasting; using the World Trade Organization and related
mechanisms to force changes in media-related trade practices; reinvigorating
the international copyright regime to affect domestic intellectual property
regimes; developing regional agreements, treaties, and customary international
law as measures to shape or limit state media law enactments; increasing
“information intervention” by the international community, especially in
postconflict situations; and encouraging an international environment that
fosters new technology (including addressing the digital divide).
Since the 1990s, the United States and Europe have mounted many efforts
to foster transitions to democracy in an effort to establish a media sector
supportive of democracy, one that has a substantial degree of editorial
independence, is financially viable, reflects diverse and plural voices,
and provides information necessary for citizenship to be meaningful. A foreign
policy of technical assistance for media reform is a mix of idealism and
realpolitik, of advocacy of principle and extension of national interest.
Each element of assistance (financial aid, organizational assistance, and
legal reform) touches on choices concerning the meaning of democracy and
the role of media in the political process. In an environment affected more
and more by new technologies, the grounding, organization, and implementation
of media assistance is in need of more systematic examination, study, and
possibly revision.
In the wake of September 11, there is an urgency to address the attitudes,
perceptions, longings, and fears of a world concerned about its future.
Suddenly during this war against terrorism, public opinion was again a significant
front and space for engagement. In the early days of US flights over Afghanistan,
bombers destroyed local radio transmitters and replaced Radio Shari’ah with
US programming. Reflecting a preoccupation with hostile attitudes across
the world, President Bush named Charlotte Beers, a veteran of the advertising
industry, as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, hoping to achieve more
aggressively favorable US images abroad. She immediately began a process
of rebranding America.
There has always been a battle for hearts and minds, but not with the
technologies, not with the constellation of nation-states, not with the
legal framework that exists today. Our student, Barbara Olson, was a master
of the media—as a best-selling author, as a television personality. She
had a great deal to teach about the way to hearts and minds, with her combination
of conviction, passion, and extraordinary political savvy. For the future,
it will be that combination that governments need and seek to employ as
they try to shape public opinion at home and abroad.

* For treatments of legal questions raised by aspects of international
broadcasting, see Leo Gross, “Some International Law Aspects of the Freedom
of Information and the Right to Communicate,” in Kaarle Nordenstreng and
Herbert I. Schiller, eds., National Sovereignty and International Communication
(Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1979), pp. 208–9. See Bhagevatula Satyanarayana Murty,
Propaganda and World Public Order: The Legal Regulation of the Ideological
Instrument of Coercion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, reissued
as The International Law of Propaganda, 1989); David Marks, “Broadcasting
across the Wall: The Free Flow of Information between East and West Germany,”
Journal of Communication 33 (winter 1983). See also John L. Martin,
International Propaganda: Its Legal and Diplomatic Control (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1958 reissued 1969). Much of this material
is cited in Stephen D. Krasner, “Global Communications and National Power:
Life on the Pareto Frontier,” World Politics, 43, no. 3 (April 1991):
336–466 at 344, to support his argument that the few international agreements
that deal with international broadcasting “are filled with the kind of confusing
and contradictory language that betrays underlying disagreements about principles
and norms.” Legal issues are also canvassed in Jamie Frederic Metzl, “Rwandan
Genocide and the International Law of Radio Jamming,” American Journal
of International Law, 91 (1997): 628.